1. Technical Field
This invention relates to telecommunications processing systems. In particular, this invention relates to a flexible and independent messaging interface between telecommunications service provider processing systems.
2. Related Art
Rapid advances in data processing and telecommunications technology have lead to a vast array of communication services available to the consumer. Such telecommunication services include traditional telephone service, Internet service, cable television service, cellular phone service, paging service, combined voice and data delivery service, and many other services.
The advances in technology, though rapid, did occur over time. As a result, many telecommunications services providers began with telecommunications system architectures directly supporting a small subset of the services now available today. The early architectures were specific to individual services, such as wireline telephone services. Furthermore, the architectures commonly employed service specific billing systems, such as billing systems tailored for wireline telephone billing. While these service specific billing systems were well suited for implementing billing related functions, these systems may not be optimized for other tasks, such as managing billing data and the like.
Beyond billing systems, each architecture also included other dedicated supporting systems, such as customer care systems. The customer care systems were responsible for communicating and receiving messages to and from the billing systems, such as messages which established new customers. In other words, as they began to offer more products and services, telecommunications service providers were faced with the time consuming, expensive, and difficult task of installing, maintaining, and upgrading multiple independent systems in multiple independent architectures.
As these systems were integrated into a unified architecture, developers took advantage of the built-in functionality of pre-existing billing systems and developed tightly coupled systems. As a result, enhancing legacy architectures poses significant technical challenges. One technical challenge lies in extending functionality to process new products and services, because the tightly coupled nature of current integrations has left the architectures limited to performing only those functionalities offered by the legacy billing systems. Thus, previous architectures could only support limited function sets supported by the legacy systems and associated integration components. In other words, these systems could be integrated only to the degree that the underlying support system offered functions for performing given tasks. Another technical challenge is tracking message processing. In the past, message tracking was limited by the functionalities of the legacy systems. Typically, legacy billing systems do not provide any capability to enable the tracking of an entity's identifier exchanged between messages from, for example, a CRM system to the billing system. As a result, telecommunication service providers are left exposed to the risk of duplicated data due to the multiple processing of the same message. Moreover, these limitations make the analysis of any rejected messages, such as invalid messages, extremely complex. These limitations hamper the telecommunications industry, which is one that continually needs to improve and evolve its existing products and services, and which frequently introduces new products and services.
Accordingly, a need has long existed for an improved rating system for a telecommunications service provider.